Learning How to Fail Well

A recent New York Times article describes a program at Smith College that teaches students how to handle failure well.  These students have always been the most successful in their high schools. According to a program leader, "For many of our students -- those who have had to be almost perfect to get accepted into a school like Smith -- failure can be an unfamiliar experience.  So when it happens, it can be crippling."

Why is such a program necessary?  I would argue that despite (or perhaps because of) their success in school, these students haven't learned this fundamental fact:  

Nothing worth learning can be mastered without making mistakes and learning from them.  

Whether it's shooting free throws, calculating the path of a projectile, or writing an excellent short story, practice is essential precisely because when we push the envelope, we often stumble, and in stumbling we expose more precisely what we don't know yet.

These days, many people understand the importance of tenacity in the learning process.  But the reason why these students are "failure deprived" runs deeper than a lack of grit.  Rather, it stems from the fact that school has trained them to be externally motivated, primarily through grades.  They believe their value as human beings is locked up in how many points they can accumulate.  That’s why, as the article describes, getting a grade less than an “A” can cause a breakdown.  

The antidote to this problem is to foster a student’s intrinsic drive to learn and excel.  When she is working out of curiosity, and she is working with other students to figure something out together, setbacks are just part of the process.  Getting a poor grade on a test is simply feedback that there is something that she hasn’t learned yet. 

Transforming a students’ posture toward failure requires reshaping the fundamental structures of the classroom.  The work students do, the feedback they are given, the conversations they have, and what happens after they take a test all have to be designed to foster a new attitude about the act of learning.  Above all, the classroom culture has to be one in which making mistakes is an expectation, not a black mark.

In other words, the classroom must become a community of self-directed learners.  Once that happens, the fear of failure becomes largely irrelevant.

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Exam Prep, Revisited

It's time to start thinking about semester exams again.  I am therefore reprising a post from May of this year on the subject.  I hope you find it useful.

A Different Way To Prepare For Exams

It's that time of year.  Everyone is gearing up for the onslaught of final exams.  I remember how, as a new teacher, I disliked the experience of spending a week of review marching the whole class through the entire scope of what they had learned that semester.  Even to my inexperienced eyes, it was clear that some of the students were bored and resentful, while others were lost and not getting the help they needed.

There is a better way.  We must first simply acknowledge that individual students have different needs when reviewing for an exam.  The task becomes one of helping each student design the review process for herself.  In other words, reviewing for an exam needs to become a differentiated learning experience.

The first step is for each student to isolate what she needs to work on to prepare for the exam.  This can be accomplished by using an ungraded pre-test that covers all the material that will be tested on the exam.  The results of the pre-test should show the teacher and each student what specific work she needs to do to review.

Every student should then be given time to do that work, transforming the review process from a lock-step activity to an individualized experience. There is also an important role for conversational learning to take place, by having students who have mastered one aspect of the curriculum teach it and answer the questions asked by students who haven't yet mastered it.

This approach frees the teacher up from forcing the class to do work that is only useful for a subset of students.  It makes each student responsible for reviewing what she still needs to master.  The teacher stops driving the train and nagging students to work.  Instead, she becomes an ally and a facilitator of learning, always a better position to be in.

Teachers:  For a detailed description of how to implement this strategy, read sections 8.12 through 8.14 of “Making Tests Meaningful”, which is found in A Teacher’s Handbook.

Working Assumptions

In order to create the classroom culture you desire, it is essential to establish a consensus with your students about your fundamental beliefs:  What is school for?  Does it truly serve the needs of students?  If a class were perfect, what would it be like?  What would students do?  What would the role of the teacher be?

One way to prompt a meaningful conversation is to create a set of your own working assumptions about your job, about school, and about the role of students, and have them discuss whether they agree or disagree with you.  The more provocative the assumptions, especially if they are truly what you believe, the more interesting the conversation will be.

If you haven't done so already, you might want to read "Discussing Working Assumptions", an excerpt from the chapter on "Starting the Year" that describes such a list.  If you are already familiar with this strategy, here are some additional ideas you might use as prompts:

• Making mistakes and learning from them are essential parts of the learning process.  Learning takes courage!
• The purpose of school is not to transfer the contents of a textbook into the mind of the student; it is to prepare that student to live a satisfying, productive, and engaged life.
• Cramming for a test, regurgitating what you've "learned", and forgetting it a little later is a complete waste of time.  It is not learning at all, even if it results in a good grade.
• Our common purpose in this classroom is for every student to learn as much and grow as much as possible.  To that end, no one has the right to interfere with anyone else's learning.

There are, of course, many ways to express what you believe about school.  It is worth the time to explore and articulate them, particularly at the start of the school year.

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The Art of Appropriate Socializing

In many traditional classrooms, socializing is seen as a distraction from learning.  This diagram expresses an all-too-common response to the natural desire of students to talk to each other.

The rigid separation of these two domains is unnatural and deeply counterproductive.  Maintaining it requires endless vigilance on the part of the teacher and lends itself to unnecessary power struggles.  These are teenagers, after all, and socializing is, for most of them, a very high priority.  Fighting it can often feel like trying to hold back the tide.  Fortunately, relinquishing that struggle will actually improve learning.

Students teaching and learning from each other,  questioning and arguing and patiently explaining new ideas to each other, is a central aspect of a community of learners.  That means students have to talk to each other.  Recognizing the centrality of conversation learning requires a different way of thinking about socializing.  For students to understand that teaching and learning from each other is an essential tool, they must be trained to be able to socialize and learn at the same time. In other words, they must learn the art of appropriate socializing, as seen in this diagram.

 In this diagram, there is significant overlap between the learning and socializing.  There will still be individual learning, of course, as indicated by the area to the left of the overlap.  This can include listening to an introductory lecture, doing homework, taking a test, or any other solitary activity.  

There will also be socializing that is unrelated to learning, as indicated by the area to the right of the overlap.  While this may at first seem to be a waste of time and a distraction, it is, within limits, essential in developing the social glue necessary to develop trust and a sense of belonging within the group.  Having students learn to self-limit this aspect of group work to a reasonable amount is part of the skill of appropriate socializing.

How much is enough?  In general, I have found a goal of 80% to 90% on-task behavior, regardless of the activity, is reasonable.  I believe this is a realistic acknowledgment of human nature, but of course you will have to decide for yourself, given your particular students and your own preferences.  Before you do, though, I would encourage you to think about department meetings or whole-school presentations you have attended.  Was every person in the room 100% attentive the entire time?  If not, why should we then expect it of our students, who are, after all, teenagers, and hard-wired to socialize?

This is an excerpt from "Study Groups: The Heart of Conversational Learning"

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The Scourge of Busywork

Consider a classic scene, repeated countless times every night:  A student has lugged home a backpack loaded with five or six heavy textbooks.  She opens one up - her assignment is to read fifteen pages and answer a set of questions at the end of the chapter.  Maybe she skims through the pages, or perhaps she turns directly to the questions.  She reads the first one, turns back to the chapter to find the answer, and dutifully writes it down.  She repeats this for the rest of the questions, closes the book with relief, and turns to the next subject’s homework.  Tomorrow she will turn the homework in, the teacher will acknowledge that she did it - possibly by rewarding her with some points - the class will go over the answers together, and tomorrow night she will repeat the process.

Perhaps this student learned something in the process, but that wasn’t really the point for her.  Completing the homework is an essential part of earning good grades.  She is successfully doing school.  Unfortunately, what she has completed is a simulation of learning - it only looks like the real thing.

This discouraging and highly ineffective process is a mainstay in the lives of many students.  And those are the successful ones.  As every teacher knows, the unsuccessful students often lack the motivation to do even that much work.  For many teachers, the fact that a student completes all her homework is evidence that she is learning the material, and of course, that does sometimes happen.  But when homework is experienced as busywork - an extremely common experience for many students - learning is a fringe benefit.  Doing hours of homework every night does not ensure that any significant learning has taken place.

When students perceive homework as meaningful and useful, it becomes a powerful tool in the learning process.  Being much more effective, even small doses have a large impact on mastery.  It’s worth noting that in Finland - whose educational system is consistently ranked the most successful- students average less than a half hour of homework per night.

The good news is that rethinking the purpose of homework and grounding it in a culture of learning, can transform it into the powerful tool it should be.  For more on how this can be done, see “Reframing Student Work”.

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Sharing The Wealth

When there is only one teacher in the room, it is almost certain that there will be a bell curve of success – there are simply too many students with too many divergent educational needs for one person to respond to.  However, if there is a structure that allows  students who understand new material faster to teach those who need more time, everyone wins – faster students learn the material more deeply by having to explain it, and slower students can ask more questions and be more engaged in one-to-one conversations.  When the room is filled with teachers and learners, everyone learns more.

In my experience, study groups are the optimal mechanism for “sharing the wealth” in this way.  When students come to trust and rely on each other, they can become engaged in a more personal and open learning process.  They come to rely on conversational learning as essential to their academic success.

There are many functions that such groups can serve.  One of the most practical is for students to review homework or individual classwork with each other.  Here is a video of several such groups going over homework.

This post is an excerpt from "A Teacher's Manual"

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Passion

When we think of the word “grit”, we often equate it with the quality of tenacity.  But in her new book on the subject, Angela Duckworth says that another quality, passion, is necessary for a person to have grit.  Without passion, she says, there is no sustained motivation to continue working through problems.  So what does this mean for the classroom?

When you spend time in a high school, you will see the exuberance and passion of students in any number of extracurricular activities.  They will spend enormous energy and time practicing on a sports team, building a set for a theater production, or preparing for a debate club.  It’s in the academic classroom where that passion is often hard to find.  

There are a number of reasons for this “passion gap” in the lives of teenagers.  In many extracurricular activities, students experience both a sense of belonging and a common purpose that is often missing in academic classrooms.  This is why the cultivation of the classroom culture that fosters those qualities is so critical.  (For more on this topic, see “Creating the Classroom Culture”.)

Duckworth offers another explanation for this passion gap.  To discover a passion in life, she says, most people go through several distinct stages.  The first is to play with new ideas, new skills, without expectations of success, and especially without external motivators, like grades.  We seem to need to flounder around before we see what we really care about.  Now, ask yourself “How often do students in academic courses have the ability to play?  How often are they involved in unprescribed activities, or doing work that won’t directly affect their grade?”

The sad truth is that it is all too rare an event.  To foster student passion for learning, we need to find ways to let them explore and play with new ideas.  That may take the form of discovery-based activities — say labs in science classes that are open-ended explorations of a new idea.  But it may also mean giving students the opportunity to do independent work of their choosing, work that may even be outside the immediate scope of the material being studied.  Letting students occasionally roam, (“following the child” in Montessori language), may take some time away from the prescribed curriculum, but it can be a worthwhile investment in their finding out what they truly care about in life.

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The Attributes of Success

"I have yet to talk to a recent graduate, college teacher, community leader, or business leader who said that not knowing enough academic content was a problem. In my interviews, everyone stressed the importance of critical thinking, communication skills, and collaboration."  —  Tony Wagner

"Character is not developed individually.  It is instilled by communities and transmitted by elders."   — David Brooks

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Walk into almost any classroom and you will find a teacher working to help students master well-defined curricular standards.  But the deeper priority should be helping students to become proficient in the skill of learning.  Still deeper must lie the ignition in students of the desire to learn and strive for excellence.  And underneath that lies the cultivation of the whole person.

The character attributes that are essential for success in school and in life include self-directedness, creativity, self-awareness and other metacognitive skills, as well as the ability to work well with others.  The student should integrate the qualities of curiosity and optimism, persistence and fearlessness, self-knowledge and the ability to think and express herself clearly.  She should have integrity, generosity of spirit, an internal sense of responsibility, and a concern for the good of the group.  She should be internally motivated,compassionate, and a good citizen in any group of any scale, from a school club to society at large.

As it happens, these attributes are not separate from intellectual growth, but are intimately interwoven with it.  They support and are often a prerequisite to genuine learning.  And intellectual growth, in turn, reinforces and makes possible further personal growth.

Cultivating these attributes prepares a student for life in a way that merely acquiring knowledge of curriculum does not. How these traits can be cultivated in students is the focus of much of this book.  For now, we need to understand that: 

1)  All these traits can be learned through young adulthood.  Many people believe that personality is “baked in” at an early age, perhaps as early as three years.  But modern research shows that this is simply not true.  A range of character traits including optimism, tenacity, resilience, empathy, and self-awareness can all be learned well into young adulthood. 

2)  These traits cannot be taught as mere content.  They aren’t learned in the way that, say, knowing the causes of the Civil War is learned.  Students can no more learn these skills by being told about them than they might learn to shoot free throws or play Mozart on the piano by hearing these skills described.  These traits require extensive practice.  They require making mistakes and learning from them.  Practicing these skills must therefore be woven into the daily fabric of the learning process, so that students live them in their everyday experiences.

The centrality of character.  The attributes of success are sometimes dismissed as “non-cognitive skills” or “soft learning goals.”  They are sometimes relegated to the category of “student well-being”— a good thing to strive for, but a side issue as far as the real work of school is concerned: the mastery of the curriculum.  This dismissive attitude towards the development of character is deeply shortsighted.  These attributes are essential for success in school and in life, and therefore should stand at the heart of what schools are for.

The problem is not that most teachers and parents don’t want the best for their students; it’s that schools do not have the explicit goal to train students to be creative, self-directed, and tenacious, to be good collaborators and citizens.  If we are going to prepare our children well for life, that has to change.

To be creative, for instance, requires being willing to make mistakes and learn from them, to have the tenacity to keep trying, especially after you fail.  However, most students do not have practice with any of these things in the classroom.  Instead, an academically successful student learns to ask, “What do I need to do to get an A?”  The thought of intentionally attempting work that she will fail at is almost incomprehensible.  Successful students often learn to be risk-averse “Excellent Sheep”, as William Deresiewicz argues in his book of the same name.  Risk aversion results in lives and careers that are less creative.

We have to teach students how to fulfill their potential, to become who they are most fully.  In the process they will learn more, and the learning will be more meaningful to them.  

They may even learn to love school.  Imagine that.

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This is an excerpt from "A New Direction", the first chapter of "A Teacher's Handbook".

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The Perils of Rigor

Imagine for a moment that a physical education program has been created to help students lead a healthier life.  Part of the program includes the goal of having students do 50 sit-ups every day.  Unfortunately, a large number of students are disinterested in doing sit-ups, even when they get punished with bad grades for not doing them.

The PE department decides it is important to have data about this problem, so the teachers are required once a week to record how many sit-ups each student does.  After several weeks, there is no significant change, so teachers are required to record the number for each student every day, then several times per day.  It’s thought that perhaps parental involvement will help, so a computer program is created and teachers post sit-up data twice a day.  Still no change.

At this point, the administration decides the teachers aren’t trying hard enough, so they link the teachers’ pay to the number of sit-ups their students can do in an annual sit-up exam.  This causes a great deal of anxiety and a plunge in morale on the part of teachers.  Inevitably, there is a scandal when several teachers get caught boosting their numbers.  Aside from that, little changes.

Finally, in desperation, it is decided that the problem is that the program isn’t rigorous enough, and the goal is raised from 50 to 100 sit-ups daily.  Of course, students don’t do more sit-ups because of this change — all that happens is that the scores go down.

In this analogy, it is clear that the one factor which has been utterly ignored is the students’ motivation, or lack of it.  Do the students believe that doing sit-ups is important or useful?  Some do, but many don’t.  Do they even think that sit-ups will make them healthier?  No one is asking.

Clearly, every effort that has been made has been from the outside in, trying to force students to do more sit-ups.  Just as clearly, their lack of motivation will ultimately prevail over any such effort. Even if a teacher discovers that by having students “cram” just before the annual test and learn a few tricks to temporarily raise their numbers, there would be little or no improvement in the student’s health, which was, after all, the original intent of the program.  And, to be honest, perhaps the number of sit-ups a person does isn’t very important in the big picture of his health.  For instance, most adults, even healthy adults, don’t do 50 sit-ups every day.

Some adults may have learned how to be healthy in school, but most figure it out on their own as adults.  Sadly, many won’t do sit-ups in part because of their memories of what it felt like being forced to do them in school.  For all too many people, the same is true for reading Shakespeare or solving mathematical problems or writing an essay.

Believing that making learning goals harder will cause unmotivated students to learn more is an exercise in magical thinking, and there is plenty of evidence that it simply doesn’t work.  Our focus should instead be on the learners and their motivation to learn.  Learning goals that don’t pay attention to these realities are counterproductive.

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Optimism

Students who have been unsuccessful in school generally expect the pattern to continue.  As with much in life, that expectation tends to be self-fulfilling.  One of the most important tasks we have as teachers is to liberate them from that fixed mindset, to help them raise their own self-imposed ceilings.  We have to teach them how to be optimistic.  Fortunately, current research says that, like so much about our personalities, optimism can indeed be learned, even through early adulthood.

Being a member of a classroom culture that believes “we can do this” instills confidence and encourages students to take chances and have tenacity in the face of challenges.  Therefore, the structures we create for our students must convey the “doability” of learning.  A struggling student needs to believe that if what she tried first didn’t work, she can try something else, and that if she keeps at it she will be successful.

The use of conversational learning, the repurposing of student work, the learning contract structure, the use of formative assessments -- the strategies described in throughout "A Teacher's Handbook" -- are designed to do just that.

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A Different Way to Prepare for Exams

It's that time of year.  Everyone is gearing up for the onslaught of final exams.  I remember how, as a new teacher, I disliked the experience of spending a week of review marching the whole class through the entire scope of what they had learned that semester.  Even to my inexperienced eyes, it was clear that some of the students were bored and resentful, while others were lost and not getting the help they needed.

There is a better way.  We must first simply acknowledge that individual students have different needs when reviewing for an exam.  The task becomes one of helping each student design the review process for herself.  In other words, reviewing for an exam needs to become a differentiated learning experience.

The first step is for each student to isolate what she needs to work on to prepare for the exam.  This can be accomplished by using an ungraded pre-test that covers all the material that will be tested on the exam.  The results of the pre-test should show the teacher and each student what specific work she needs to do to review.

Every student should then be given time to do that work, transforming the review process from a lock-step activity to an individualized experience. There is also an important role for conversational learning to take place, by having students who have mastered one aspect of the curriculum teach it and answer the questions asked by students who haven't yet mastered it.

This approach frees the teacher up from forcing the class to do work that is only useful for a subset of students.  It makes each student responsible for reviewing what she still needs to master.  The teacher stops driving the train and nagging students to work.  Instead, she becomes an ally and a facilitator of learning, always a better position to be in.

Teachers:  For a detailed description of how to implement this strategy, read sections 8.12 through 8.14 of “Making Tests Meaningful”, which is found in A Teacher’s Handbook.

Slow Learning

The standards movement has had a number of unintended consequences. One of the most pervasive is a dramatic increase in the pressure on teachers to cover an ever-growing curriculum at a frenetic  pace.  Even when they see the importance of establishing an appropriate classroom culture at the start of the year, teachers often say they can’t afford to spend as little as two or three days establishing that culture because they will be left behind. Behind what? Behind the relentless schedule of covering content as proscribed by standards that must be met.

There are real costs to this pressure, not least the loss of satisfaction of exploring an idea deeply because it is intriguing.  Just as a “slow food” movement exists to remind us to savor the experience of eating, we need to remember that the act of learning can be a deeply pleasurable experience. The excitement of an “aha” moment, the slow smile that creeps onto a person’s face as she understands a new idea, the intimate connection that grows out of a deep conversation — these are pleasures that require time.

But it is not just for aesthetic reasons that we should challenge the frantic pace of covering content. When students feel overwhelmed with new material, it reinforces the sense that school is impersonal, a “curriculum factory”. It leads directly to greater disillusionment and disengagement. It also, ironically, leaves more students behind and results in lower test scores.

To truly digest and internalize any idea worth knowing, students need to process it, struggle with it, discuss it. To truly learn anything there must be enough time to do the work of learning.

Learning takes time. We need to slow school down to make learning more meaningful.

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Compliance Is Not Responsibility

A lot of harsh behavior on the part of teachers and administrators is done in the name of teaching students to be responsible.  Overly punitive responses to infractions like tardiness or not turning in homework on time are rationalized as helpful in training students in the value of making deadlines.  Unfortunately, what they are often really learning is that they will be punished if they don’t do as they are told.

There is another way.  Assuming we truly want our students to become responsible for their own behavior, they must internalize the desire to do the right thing, and that requires our treating them with respect and trust.

If a student misses a deadline, for example, instead of giving her no credit for the assignment, it would be more productive to help her see the cost of her actions, such as not being prepared to have a conversation with her study group, and therefore letting her group mates down as well as losing an opportunity for genuine learning.  If this is handled non-judgmentally, the student might actually begin the process of critiquing her own behavior.  Perhaps she procrastinates, or she is working a side job for too many hours each week.  Giving her a zero is unlikely to cause her to challenge those problems nearly as effectively as a compassionate conversation about how she might deal with them.  Allowing her a choice in how to get the work done, and setting a realistic deadline helps her learn to take charge of her actions.  This is how she will learn to be truly responsible.

One further and all-too-frequent excuse for punitive behavioris that it prepares students for “the real world”.  This assumes that what we are doing in school is somehow not real, and it projects a bleak image of the world outside of school.  Surely, if a person has an abusive boss later in life, there are more responsible ways to deal with it — working to change the situation, or, in the worst case, finding another job — than simply submitting to oppressive conditions.

Our job is not to train our students to comply with the worst aspects of “the real world”.  If education works well, they will deal with that world responsibly, and perhaps even work to make it better.

Juking the Stats

Watching “The Wire”, HBO’s gritty TV series about life in Baltimore, I recently came across a remarkably clear explanation of how institutions create perverse incentives and undermine the very change they claim to champion.  The series draws vivid parallels between the Baltimore police department going through meaningless contortions to meet arrest quotas and classroom teachers abandoning teaching to meet standardized test quotas.  And it’s not just that both activities are meaningless.  It’s also obvious that both actively undermine the legitimate and important work they are supposed to be enhancing, often with tragic results.

The police want to make the streets safer., but once the “brass” decides that the meaning of “safer” is to have better “stats” -- higher arrest numbers, say, or lower numbers of felonies -- then the police start to do what they have to to meet those goals.  More meaningless arrests take place, more busts for minor infractions, and there are more distortions and lies in the reporting of arrests (“felonies become misdemeanors, rapes disappear”).  The cops learn to juke the stats.

The consequence is that meaningful work is displaced by busywork and cops become more cynical about what they are being made to do.  Even worse, the police are no longer connecting with the neighborhoods they work in;  they are seen by the residents as an occupying force that no one should cooperate with.  The whole endeavor creates a state of tension between police and the people they are supposed to be protecting;  they have become enemies in a never-ending war.  Neighborhoods become less safe, but because the police are juking the stats, it looks from the outside like the city is safer.  The “brass” are satisfied - the stats say the city is safer - but the city has, in fact, become more dangerous.  

Now consider the inner city classrooms being shown in the series.  Teachers are being forced to teach to high-stakes test.  Even when teachers are making progress in difficult classes, once they start doing test prep, school becomes meaningless again for the students, who resent being made to do work that is boring and pointless.  They even resent having to give up real learning.  They resent the teacher for making them do what they don’t want to do.  More power struggles erupt, and animosity increases between teacher and students.  The amount of learning going on drops.

At the same time, teachers become more cynical about what they are being made to do.  The job gets harder and their motivation plummets.

Students sitting in rows listening politely to a teacher lecturing certainly looks like learning.  Similarly, raising test scores and grades looks like academic success.  In fact, they are both simulations of what they seem to be, and they both actually undermine the very thing they are intended to do.  School superintendents work hard to raise test scores because they believe that proves more learning is taking place.  But the pressure and distorted priorities of those tests alienate both teachers and students and ironically reduce the amount of learning taking place.

The widespread cynicism, even cheating, caused by the current approach based on high stakes testing is all the evidence we need: any strategy that inevitably leads to juking the stats needs to be replaced with something more effective.

"Should" is a Dangerous Word

The capacity to imagine is certainly one of the most powerful of human abilities.  We cannot plan for the future without it, because we have to imagine the future (which never really exists), in order to decide what to do next.  Imagination lies at the heart of all human creativity.  It is what allows us to improve on the world by imagining it as better than it is, and then striving to make it so.

It also gets us into trouble.  When we use the word “should”, for instance, we are trying to impose our imaginary world on the real one, often with results we weren't expecting.

Consider a well-intentioned math teacher, who, when making plans for the start of the school year thinks to herself, “Well, this is Algebra II;  they certainly should know the order of operations by now”.  She then plans the first week’s activities accordingly.

Now consider this scene from the point of view of a student who has been exposed to the order of operations a number of times, but has never learned it.  The odds are that math classes have not been a good experience for him.  Perhaps his grades have been at the bottom of the bell curve and he has, out of self-preservation, come to believe that he is “not good at math”.  He sits at the back of the room and never voluntarily engages - he doesn’t want to expose himself to more failure.

For such a student, the first week’s activities immediately cause him to feel lost.  The fact that some of his peers are able to do the work simply confirms his self-doubt.  The train leaves the station, and he is, once again, left behind and feeling bad about it.

By treating the student as he should be rather than as he is, the teacher has inadvertently made a bad situation worse.  This student may never recover the self-confidence needed to participate and be successful in her class.  The lesson?  When we are dealing with students and hear ourselves using the word “should”, alarm bells need to go off.

But what if the teacher had instead recognized that some students may not actually know the order of operations, and done a checkup to see who did and who didn’t.  Now the first week would include remediation for students lacking this prerequisite skill.  Perhaps our student might have some early successes and be able to build on them.  He may even learn the first traces of optimism about his ability to learn math.  He might, in other words, begin to challenge the fixed mindset that has created self-imposed limits on his life.

Working with reality as it is is simply more effective than working with the imaginary world as we think it ought to be.